USA > Louisiana > Orleans Parish > New Orleans > Creole families of New Orleans > Part 9
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De Pontalba's paper is pronounced a masterly production by the best of judges, Charles Gayarré. Its wonderful clearness of political insight, and the complete knowledge exhibited in it of the condition of the province in its relation to Spain and the United States, had seemingly a convincing effect on the mind of the First Consul. It was presented to him on the 15th of September, and fifteen days later the Treaty of St. Ildefonso was concluded, by which Louisiana was retroceded by Spain to France.
A careful reading of the paper to-day warrants the inference that its effect may have been still further influenced in predisposing Napoleon's mind in favor of the ultimate cession of the province to the United States. Marigny, in his later paper, "Reflections Politiques," clearly indicates this. The following extract is a good example of de Pontalba's judicial tone toward the revolution against Ulloa and the subsequent surprising result of the Spanish domination in gaining the hearts of the Creoles, and, as in de Pontalba's case, the loyal services of the French officers.
"After having granted to Louisiana all that might be in her power, France would, in the event of taking possession again of it, still
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have done nothing for her if she did not give her as Governor an honest, frank, just and good man who, by his conciliating temper, would gain the affection of the inhabitants. They are of a mild, sensitive and remarkably grateful temper. The statement of one fact alone will be sufficient to show how much I ought to insist upon this point. After having done in order to remain French more than it was then permitted to subjects to do, after having seen the solicitations of their delegates rejected by the court of France, the inhabitants of Louisiana, after having deliberated among themselves, came to the resolution of relying on nothing else than their courage, which was the sole resource remaining to them. The result was the expulsion of Ulloa.
"O'Reilly arrived with an army. He had caused himself to be preceded by words of peace, indulgence, and forgetfulness of the past. The colonists abandoned by the mother country thought that they were no longer bound to nurse and preserve for her the love which she rejected. They gave themselves up to the hope of an endurable condition under a new master and received him without resistance. O'Reilly's conduct is but too well known. It exasperated every heart and caused the new domination to be abhorred.
"The Count of Galvez made his appearance and inspired the public with confidence; for he was distinguished for the affability of his manners, the sweetness of his temper, the frankness of his character, the kindness of his heart and bis love of justice. Receiving in 1779 the news of the declaration of war against the English, he convened the colonists around him. 'Let them who love me follow where I lead' said he; and the next day fifteen hundred Creoles, among them many heads of families, gathered round him, and were ready to march to the enemy."
On the 3d of October, 1802, Pontalba presented a petition to the First Consul, stating that he, Joseph Xavier Delfau de Pontalba, one of the principal propriéteurs of Louisiana, where he was born, had renounced his rank in the army of Spain, and that the transfer of some of his fortune to France showed his desire of becoming a French citizen once more, and proving his devotion to France. He stated that he has given the Minister some notes on the relation
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of the United States to Louisiana, and on the colony in general, which the Minister had found of use; he asks, therefore, that his previous service in the French Army also be taken into consideration and that he be appointed Adjutant-General without pay in the French Army; asking only the honor to serve the French Republic. This is annotated by General Victor: "Colonel Pontalba had given val- uable notes on Louisiana."
The Minister of Foreign Affairs makes a report upon the petition that Pontalba, having renounced service with Spain, would be very useful to France in the newly-acquired colony; that he had furnished an interesting Memoir and asked the grade of Adjutant-General without pay. Decrès annotates it: "This has been presented to the First Consul, who has commanded that a prepared commission be presented to him." Decrès soon after sends him the commission with the intimation that it is accorded, with the hope that he will cooperate with the new Captain-General (Victor) and Prefect toward the prosperity of the colony of which France takes pos- session, and which she wishes to see flourish.
But neither General Victor nor Pontalba came to New Orleans. In 1807, de Pontalba bought the magnificent château of Mont l'Evêque (dep. Oise) where he enjoyed, as he had often declared in his letters to his wife, what would constitute the realiza- tion of his highest ideal of human felicity-a life passed in the family circle with her, his son and their good aunt, Madame Miro.
Here the little boy Tintin (Celestin de Pontalba) grew to young manhood. When still a boy, in 1804, he had been made a page of the Emperor. Five
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years later, when but nineteen, he was given the grade of Sous-Lieutenant of a regiment of Chasseurs à cheval, at the request of Marshal Ney, Duc d'Elchingen, who states to the Minister of War that the young man was related to his wife; that he was a youth in whom he took the greatest interest, and whom he desired to attach to himself later as aide-de-camp. In 1811, Ney writes further to the Minister of War that the young de Pontalba had served under him at the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeyda, had made the campaign of Portugal, just terminated, and had shown himself brave, zealous and active in service, asking as a particu- lar favor that he be promoted as aide-de-camp. ! Napoleon himself countersigns the order for the promotion.
The next official paper in the "Dossier Pontalba" grants a leave of absence for six months that the young Sous-Lieutenant may go to New Orleans to contract a marriage. De Pontalba was accom- panied to New Orleans by his mother.
The marriage figured for over a century in New Orleans' social traditions as the most important one ever contracted in Louisiana. According to the standards of the time, a standard fixed by the parents and not by the children, it was a perfect one, uniting as it did the only son and heir of the rich and distinguished Baron de Pontalba, with the only daughter and heiress of the wealthy Don Andres Almonaster, the famous benefactor of the city; the donor of the Cathedral, a schoolhouse, a hospital, a chapel, and the builder of the Cabildo; also a Chevalier of the noble and royal Order of Charles III, and the standard bearer (Alfarez Real) !
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of the Royal and Illustrious Municipality of New Orleans, to quote from the Spanish register in the Cathedral.
Don Andres had died in 1798, leaving a great fortune to his wife and two daughters, Andrea and Micaela. Andrea survived her father only a short time, and her share of the estate went to increase the portions of her mother and sister. Micaela, sixteen at the time of her marriage, had been educated in the Ursuline Convent, and had never seen the world outside her native city and her mother's circle in society. She was not good looking, but had intelligence. She had been asked in marriage (the fate of heiresses) by every bachelor in the community, but her worldly-wise mother, the pettish "Louison" of the Pontalba letters, had other views in her head and was deaf, it is said, to the prayers of even her daughter, who had given her heart in an unworldly-wise manner to an impe- cunious youth.
Madame Almonaster wrote cheerfully to the Baron de Pontalba in a letter (written according to the standard of the day) :
"My daughter has no inclination for any one; she wishes to see her cousin; she says, 'What a pity if such a pretty marriage should fail!' They seem to be made one for the other." .
As for the young groom of twenty, nothing is known of him beyond his official record already quoted. According to his portrait, he was a re- markably handsome young officer in his uniform of the Chasseurs; his face, too soft and pretty, was indeed the face of a petted only son, who had been fed through childhood and youth on tender smiles
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and words of endearment. It was a great contrast to that of his stern, strong father, the Indian fighter and sturdy soldier of Bienville, the shrewd business man, that we know in New Orleans.
Dispensation was obtained for the degree of con- sanguinity, and in order to hasten the affair for the publication of the usual number of banns. To quote the account at the time, the young couple set
i out from the altar to France, accompanied by the two mothers. The Baron awaited them in Mont l'Evêque.
The next document concerning him comes not from the "Archives de la Marine, Dossier Pontalba," but from the "Procédure de M. le Maréchal Ney, par devant le Conseil de Guerre." Among the effects of the Marshal seized at the time of his arrest was found the following letter:
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"PARIS, 11th of July, 1815.
"Monsieur le Maréchal,
"It seems to me that, in the event of your deciding to leave France, you would give the preference to Louisiana over other parts of the United States; that colony would, in truth, offer you more agreeable inducements than the Eastern parts. You would find in the manners, character, and language of the people, formerly French, a way of living more conformed to your own. Life there is not only much less expensive than in New York, but it is much more in accord- ance with our habits. The one reason to be alleged against that part of America is the sickness that often reigns in New Orleans, during the months of 7bre and 8bre. But it does not extend outside the city. One is not attacked by it in the country; therefore all men of means retire to it at that period, and nothing retaining you in the city you could easily seek shelter from the danger. You would find among my relatives and friends in Louisiana, a welcome even more cordial than is bespoken in the letters I enclose to you. When you enter the Mississippi River, you will have to ascend it for thirty-six leagues. The Captain forwards the mail to the city, from the mouth of the river, by a skiff. Therefore by sending to
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Marigny the letter I addressed to him you can count upon finding him at the landing to meet you.
"Make use of me, M. le Maréchal, and count upon it that on all occasions you will find in me the same devotion that I have never ceased to show you."
Pontalba's letters to Marigny and others in New Orleans have already been quoted. But New Orleans was not to have the honor of receiving, nor the people of New Orleans of entertaining, in their hospitable manner the noble and distinguished Marshal. He was, as we know, executed in the gardens of the Luxembourg five months after de Pontalba's letter, written, one cannot avoid the surmise, not only to give an invitation, but also to convey an intimation in the way of advice; and, involuntarily, another surmise arises in the mind of a New Orleanian, that de Pontalba may have ventured still further and may have suggested the rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena. It was pro- posed, according to a faithful chronicle in the city, to convey him in a swift-sailing vessel to New Orleans, where a house was built for him-a stately mansion that is still standing awaiting its imperial guest to-day as in 1815. The Battle of New Orleans and glorious defeat of the British had given the city no inconsiderable fame in 1815; and the gather- ing in the city of a distinguished band of old warriors from the Napoleonic army may have seemed to de Pontalba an opportunity for escape and safety that the Emperor would have been wise to seize.
Two years after his marriage, Celestin de Pontalba's resignation was accepted and he was freed from all military service and permitted to retire to his home in the magnificent estate of Mont
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l'Evêque, where lived also his father, mother and aunts, Madame Miro and Mademoiselle Macarty.
During the early years of the marriage three sons were born: Celestin, Alfred and Gaston. Madame Almonaster re-married soon after and died in 1827. 1 Her fortune went to her daughter, Micaela. Young and immensely wealthy, even according to the ? standards of Paris, Micaela was not unnaturally tempted to enjoy her advantages according to the tastes of Paris. She bought a magnificent hôtel and furnished it in a splendid way, and gave entertain- ments which even the haughty and aristocratic society of the Faubourg St. Germain attended.
The Baron made over to his son the château of Mont l'Evêque (whose garden was the finest in France) and the family, including always Madame Miro and her sister, Mademoiselle Macarty, retired to a new home bought in the outskirts of Senlis.
But Micaela cared not for the country. When she paid unavoidable visits to the stately château of Mont l'Evêque, she carried with her a princely retinue of servants, and generally a cortège of fashionable friends and the leading actors of the great companies. She built a theatre in her grounds and acted in it herself. In short the Creole heiress followed the beaten path of her kind, in life as in fiction. The story is a commonplace one. Her husband cared only for the quiet pleasures of domestic life. His father, mother, aunts, children and wife constituted his world. The brilliant round of Paris pleasures grew distasteful; the extravagant expenditure of money abhorrent.
Estrangement between husband and wife fol- lowed and practical separation. In short, what had
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Fire.
E. Woodward New Orleans 19 .
The Napoleon House (with the belvedere) on Chartres Street back of the Court House.
المبطنة مائة.
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constituted in wordly eyes the perfection of the union became its destruction, twenty years after its con- summation. From its beginning the contract drawn with so much business sagacity became a casus belli. Lawsuits ensued-the veil of family secrecy was rent in twain, because, in truth, the one thing needful, in marriage, which the contract had ignored, was lacking.
Micaela made a dash to Louisiana in 1831 to secure the succession of her mother and, if possible, a divorce from her husband; but a timely interven- tion from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sebastiani, frustrated this last. She returned by way of the great cities of the North and the Falls of Niagara, describing them to her aunt, Madame de Chalmette, in letters written with all the exuberance of a strong, original mind. On her return to Paris she obtained her independence of her husband and his family.
The culmination of the greatest Louisiana matri- monial union was a tragedy, that has bowed the fine old name of Pontalba under a veil of crape. It is a family secret of New Orleans, guarded with filial piety; the details are imparted by those who know them under the seal of personal confidence; the ghastly truth only is acknowledged, which is- that at Mont l'Evêque, on an October morning in 1834, Madame de Pontalba was discovered on the floor of her apartment, weltering in her blood, and apparently in a dying condition, her body torn with pistol shots. The old Baron was found dead, sitting upright in a great armchair in his apartment, a pistol in his hand!
Thus, in a moment of insanity, in his eightieth year, passed away the fine soldier of Bienville, the
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dashing Indian fighter, the noble aristocrat, the devoted husband, the too-doting father, the writer of charming letters, the author of the masterly "Memoir of Louisiana!"
By a miracle, Madame de Pontalba recovered, carrying to her death the bullets in her body and maintaining to the end the prestige of her wealth, position, and indomitable will. Still frequenting and frequented by the Faubourg St. Germain, she escaped none of the horror and excitement that filled the minds of the Ancien Régime, when it became rumored that the beautiful palace built by Louis XIV for the Duc de Maine, on the rue de Lille, was to be bought by the "Bande Noire" and razed to the ground-the site to be filled with smaller buildings. With her Louisiana millions she bought the palace herself, and even attempted, with the vaulting pride of woman, to live in it. Only royal wealth and attendance could, however, properly fill the place-four hundred rooms it contained, so the new proprietor, submitting, as even royal per- sonages must, to circumstances, demolished the palace herself, but reserved all its artistic wealth of carvings, columns, ornaments and marbles for the new hôtel she built; a hôtel of magnificent state but more in proportion to her position and means. It was sold afterwards for five million francs to one of the Rothschilds.
Celestin de Pontalba came but once to New Orleans, on a business visit. His mother came twice, once as we have seen before the tragedy in 1831, and once later, when she received a warm welcome from
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her friends and relatives; ardent sympathizers in her griefs and misfortunes. *
Finding her native city in full tide of prosperity and architectural development, she was too much the daughter of her father not to want to connect her name with that of New Orleans. In 1846, through her agent, she communicated to the Council of the Municipality her desire to aid in the embellish- ment of her native city, proposing to demolish the two rows of buildings fronting on the Place d'Armes from Chartres and Condé (lower Chartres) Streets to the levee, and to replace these buildings by edifices according to a plan submitted to the Council. But with an astuteness worthy of her father, she would consent to carry out the project only if seconded by the Council, making the request that the new edifices be exempt from city taxation for twenty years from the date of their completion. The Council consented, providing that the entire front of said structures, in St. Peter's and St. Anne Streets, should be finished in all particulars according to the plans furnished.
In 1849, Madame de Pontalba communicated to the Council that, relying upon their resolution, she had contracted for the demolition and reconstruc- tion proposed; the Council, on the excuse of some flaw in the contract, claimed that they were without authority to grant her the exemption asked for. Notwithstanding this, with characteristic energy, she persisted in her filial and patriotic purpose. Her plans grew in beauty and grandeur and finally found
* "Jackson Square," Henry Renshaw, Louisiana Historical So- ciety. Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 1.
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consummation in the stately rows of buildings that stand on the northern and southern sides of the Place d'Armes. They were finished in 1850 and from the standpoint of to-day, even with the wear and tear of three-quarters of a century, to quote from the last pretty compliment paid them: "They are fair to look upon and they arouse admiration by their noble proportions, their spacious verandas and elegance of the tendril-like iron work, which displays the interlaced initials of the families of Almonaster and Pontalba."
All guides of New Orleans relate with proud pleasure that the central house of the row was finished in time to be furnished and offered to Jenny Lind as a residence when she came to the city in 1850. The celebrated chef and culinary authority of the time, Boudro, was engaged for the cuisine; it is also said that the Diva ever afterwards, in speaking of her visit to the city, mentioned him as the greatest attraction she had found in it. But the houses were entirely out of keeping with their old setting of the Place d'Armes, which still retained its rustic ap- pearance of a village muster green, with grass-grown spaces enclosed within a dilapidated iron railing. Its only beauty consisted of its double avenue of old sycamores, the favorite promenade and the delight of the old citizens, who were fond of passing the summer afternoons under their shade, while enjoying the fresh breezes from the river.
It was from the Square that the evening gun was fired which gave the signal for slaves to retire from the streets; here it was that O'Reilly had proclaimed the sovereignty of Spain, and Laussat later the domination of the French Republic. And grass
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grown and shabby as it was, more gloriously still it was the scene of the cession of Louisiana to the United States. From its flagstaff, the fleur-de-lis the banner of Spain, the tricolor, had all risen in temporary sovereignty, until the flag of the United States arose and spread its folds to the wind, in sign of proud, permanent possession.
General Jackson passed in triumph through it to the Cathedral after his glorious victory of Chalmette. Nevertheless it had to submit to the spirit (the ruthless spirit, as it seems) of improvement. Its venerable sycamores were felled, despite the agonized protests of the citizens; its rough greensward was laid off in parterres. A flower garden was made of it, and a clean sweep (as it were) was made of its old memories and traditions, by changing its name and consecrating it to the memory of the hero of Chalmette.
When Madame de Pontalba left New Orleans in 1851, she carried with her the consciousness of having left, even as her father had done, an enduring mark upon her native city. In addition to a considerable contribution to the erection of the monument to Jackson, for whom she had an enthusiastic admira- tion, she had furnished a suitable site for it (a nobler one could not have been found in the United States), and she had added grandly to her father's benefac- tions-the Cathedral, the Cabildo and the Presby- tère, by giving them noble and worthy surroundings, assuring beyond peradventure against the neglect and decay that have degraded many an historic and ecclesiastic center in Europe. For a half century the Pontalba buildings furnished the dwellings of the most exclusive families in the city. Jackson
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Square still reigns, the center of all civic, social and ecclesiastical functions of ceremony; the noble monument in its center, far from excluding, seems courteously to salute the old traditions and memories which seem to follow the great General as he guides his charger toward the Cathedral portal.
Micaela returned to her life in Paris and reigned there in a kind of exotic supremacy; giving her great entertainments and welcoming to them right cordially friends and relatives from her native place.
Charles Gayarré,* a kinsman and friend, used to relate that in 1837 he once had taken dinner with her on the evening of a great ball she was giving, to be preceded by a concert of artists from the Italian opera. The repast was luxurious in every particular, with many guests; among them were Celestin, her husband, with whom she was more friendly, and her three grown sons. She presided in a magnificent toilette and was taking the lead, as usual, in conversation, when she suddenly turned ghastly pale and fell back in her chair unconscious. Her sons at once calmed the guests, and carried their mother to a couch, explaining simply that she often suffered such attacks. They were the result of the wounds inflicted by her father-in-law. The banquet, the concert and the ball proceeded as if nothing had happened.
Charles Gayarré described her as majestic and impressive, and with the kindest possible expression of countenance, particularly when speaking to or about people from her old home. She died in 1874, in her hôtel, rue St. Honoré. Her husband survived
* Related also to the author.
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her four years, dying in 1878, at the age of ninety- seven, in his domicile, Avenue Malakoff.
Celestin de Pontalba, the eldest son and eventual bearer of the title, like his father came to New Orleans for his wife. He married, in 1858, Françoise Georgine Blanche Ogden who, like himself, belonged to a historic family of New Orleans. Her mother was the daughter of Madame de McNamara, who was a daughter of Chauvin des Islets de Léry and Charlotte Faucon du Manoir. McNamara was an Irishman (his title of Count has never been explained) who came to Louisiana early in 1800 to become a planter. Mérieult was the name of his plantation (below the city), from the name of its former owner.
The marriage of Celestin to Blanche Ogden, as she was familiarly called, was one of the pretty memories that survived to an old lady, a very grande dame of the past .* She was one of the little girls who clus- tered on the steps of the Cathedral to see the bride (a beautiful blonde) walk in, as was the custom of that time, at the head of a long suite of beautiful bridesmaids.
And, à propos of the beautiful blonde bride, comes to memory another story-a tradition. Madame McNamara Mérieult, sojourning in Paris during the Empire, was noted for her beauty, which was enhanced by a wonderful chevelure, golden blonde, that fell like a veil to her feet. Napoleon, so the fantastic story goes, who was at that time wishing to please the Sultan of Turkey, heard that that royal personage was looking through Paris for a
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